"This publisher has been blocked from running software on your pc"

I have scoured the internet on this one, so hopefully someone here can help me.

My company has been running Exact Software, Macola Progression for literally decades, and it works on every computer on our network except mine.

For those not familiar with the program, it is hosted on a server from a mapped letter drive (m:\ in this case) and executed from a shortcut on your desktop, that is mapped to the EXE on the mapped drive. It is a massive bandwidth hog, so running remotely is never a good idea, but i digress.

The problem i have been having, and unable to work around for more than a day is Windows security settings. In this case "This publisher has been blocked form running software on your PC". 

Name: (listed mapped network path to exe file)

Publisher: Unknown Publisher

Type: application

From: (same as Name)

This file is in a location outside your local network. Files from locations you dont recognize can harm your PC. If you trust the location, you should unblock the publisher. 

(Then there is a link to "how do i unblock this publisher".)

Problem 1: i am the network admin, and i didnt block this publisher. If i did, i wouldnt be the only one with the problem...but here i am, the only one blocked. i can run this on any other machine with my username/password no problem

Problem 2: this isn't outside my network. i am connected to a domain. Granted, at the time of this writing, i was trying to troubleshoot this while connected via VPN, but still, not an outside network (technically in this case), but the problem still exists when i am of my office network

Problem 3: the link in the error message that should take me to information on how to unblock, takes me to the Windows 11 site and asked me to download and run windows 11... small issues there, i have windows 11 on this machine already.

What i have tried:

some sources online suggested right clicking on the program icon, going to the security tab, or general tab depending on the source, and clicking "unblock"... no such button exists when i try this.

I have also looked at Manage Computer Certificates. and at first this system was listed as untrusted. i got rid of that certificate, and reinstalled the certificate as a trusted published... and that worked for about 1 day, then it goes right back to blocking me again.

sometimes i can get logged in, then it blocks the individual apps within the program. sometimes it works without a problem.

I have tried refreshing my network connection, switching to WiFi, trying a different network cable, re-installing the program... it all works for 1 day, then this occurs again.

i also looked as security settings on the server. "Everyone" is set to full access on this mapped drive due to the nature of the program. but to be safe, i added myself to the list with full access as well. no change.

my best guess right now is the system sees that the certificate from the publisher expired in 2015, but not sure why that would matter, since every other computer on our network  (windows 10 or better) works fine. so just bypassing the monitoring would be an acceptable solution in my book, but i have tried the obvious stuff like disabling the security services in Windows that would do this, but it doesn't seem to work. 

we are in the process of getting away from this app, and going with a different system, but until that happens, i need to be able to log in, without having to take over a server to access our system.

again, any progress i make on this, is undone the next day. the only success i am having is getting more frustrated with this problem.

any ideas appreciated.